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Friday, 27 April 2018

I just got a new monitor for a computer that I use regularly. It's 2560 by 1440 pixels, and 32 inches diagonally. It's big, it's beautiful and it's perfect. And it cost £189.99 on eBay, delievery free next day from Currys.

Saturday, 7 April 2018

Several months ago, I got an email from Hungary claiming that I hadn't paid my VAT for Q1 2017, and I owed them 8.65 euros. I passed the email over to HMRC, because I use the HMRC VAT Moss system. That lets me pay the VAT to all 27 non-UK EU countries in one go, telling them how much goes to each. And then HMRC pays the various tax authorities in each country. HMRC told me to take no action, they'd deal with it. So I just left them to it.

Today, I got another email, suggesting that I owe them for Q4 2017, the sum of 33.33 euros.
So I've passed that on to HMRC, and I've asked what happened to the previous demand?

Hungary is now quite low on my list of countries I love.

And.

We triggered article 50 a year ago. A year from now, we tumble out of the EU. There might be some intervening period, of a couple of years, we don't know the details of that yet.

What I'm wondering is this. When I sell the USA, there's no VAT to pay, because the USA isn't in the EU, and I don't have a tariff to pay. When we are disgorged from the EU:

Will I have to still pay VAT on exports to EU countries?
Will the VAT Moss system still be there?
What happens during the two years when we're partially in ?

Tuesday, 3 April 2018

Jeff Bones emailed me - his computer won't boot up and he has valuable data on it. So I asked him to bring it round.

I used to do data recovery professionally, but I haven't done that for 25 years. Just occasionally as a favour to a friend.

He was right. The Advent laptop computer got as far as a screen from Windows telling me about a problem. That's good, it shows that the drive is at least working. The drive is a 500 gb 2 1/2 inch Sata drive, a Western Digital WD5000 BEVT. I had a look around; those are pretty much unobtainable now, but there's lots of other similar 500gb drives for sale.

So I connected up an external DVD drive (I couldn't persuade the built-in DVD drive to read my DVDs, I don't know why, and didn't investigate it because I was happy to use my own DVD drive) and booted up from Fedora Linux Live. Fedora Linux Live means that I'm running Linux, but didn't install anything on the hard disk. Because if I did install on the hard disk, that would wipe out the data I'm trying to recover.

So Linux booted up fine. I connected it to my internal network, which meant I could ssh into it and run stuff on it without having to use the inferior laptop keyboard (all laptop keyboards are inferior to my beautiful IBM Model S clicky keyboard).

I had a look around, and I was able to mount drives sda1 and sda2, and I could see all the files. So now I need to copy the files. But there's 150 gb of files. Obviously Jeff didn't want them all; a lot of them were system files, temporary files, ancient backups and so on. But Jeff needs to think a bit to decide what he wants.

I started off by copying the files across the network to my server. But that was going astoundingly slowly (I don't know why) and wasn't really going to fully solve the problem. Because I'd need 30-odd DVDs to copy that lot. Not practical.

Then I had an idea. I have a 1000 gb external drive. So I connected that, and started copying the files to it. Then I stopped, because I realised that I had a linux ext3 file system on that drive, and can Windows handle that? I don't know. But Linux can handle an NTFS file system. So I deleted the partition on my 1000 gb, and made a new partition, telling fdisk that it would be NTFS. Then I formatted it as an NTFS file system, and mounted it to the laptop.

I used rsync to copy the files from the laptop to my 1000 gb, and I was surprised how quickly that went. So now I have Jeff's 150 gb of data on this external drive. I've suggested that he bring his new laptop round, so that I could connect up the external drive and check that everything is accessible, and then he can, in his own time, rummage through the files that I've rescued, and copy them to his new computer.